In India, adolescent girls are among society's most vulnerable groups as they are exposed to risks that challenge their healthy development into young women. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of introducing a multidimensional intervention in late 2010 in India: The Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for the Empowerment of Adolescent Girls- SABLA. The objective of this scheme is to raise awareness on health and health behaviours, and promote self-development and life skills, targeting adolescent girls aged 11-18. We show how family planning knowledge, the use of family planning methods (contraception), autonomy in decision-making, and knowledge of infectious disease treatment, respond as a result of this program. Using data from the nationally representative India Demographic and Health Survey (IDHS), with plausibly exogenous variations in the program's rollout across districts and birth cohorts, we provide evidence that exposure to SABLA increases the likelihood of young female participants having knowledge of family planning and diarrhoea treatment, using contraception, and having autonomy in their personal financial decision-making. The effects are more pronounced for women who reside in urban areas, have completed secondary education or higher, and primarily for Muslim women.
Our study contributes to an extensive literature on the health and socioeconomic effects of women's empowerment programs, most of which identifies the effects of such programs on fertility, employment, and domestic violence; although closely linked, these studies differ from ours. Our study additionally contributes to a growing economic literature on the effects of informal education on a broad set of indicators of women's empowerment, including health awareness and attitudes toward healthy behaviours, such as reproductive behaviour (family planning) and decision-making. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to provides a causal analysis of the efficacy of an adolescent girls' empowerment program on such a broad range of empowerment indicators.